The double referral bonuses have been available for college students (anyone with a @.edu or equivalent email address) for quite a while. Glad to see it's available for everyone now!
The part that gets me there is that paid users got doubled to 1GB instead of the 500MB and EDU users got no benefit from the bump. (It's free, so I'm not complaining very loudly)
I was hoping it would do something seriously trick (that I have no idea how to implement) and ask the local client to upload instead of a pedestrian HTTP upload.
That might be possible to implement, actually. Just like how clicking on facebook spotify 'listen with' links now plays the song in the _spotify_ app, there may be a way on the server to control what the client does...
A custom protocol wouldn't strictly be necessary. You could have the browser tell the server the path of the dropped files then have the server instruct the native client to fetch and upload those files.
However the File object hides the full path from the JavaScript code for security reasons (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/File). I assume most dropped files would contain the user's home directory and therefore account name in the path.
The client has a permanent connection to the server, but in this case the server doesn't necessarily know what client it's on, and some of us have our browsers configured to be pesky (with a dialog box indicating the URL and target app) about sending URLs to different apps.
On Windows at least, this requires a registry entry to associate the application with the new "protocol". Steam does this as well to launch games and so forth with "steam://foo"
I think that the main use comes from when you're not at your own computer. If you're at work or a friend's house, it'll be far simpler to just drag the file into the browser than to install dropbox.
I'm in that situation about four times a year and this will be a huge time saver compared to the old system.
